Charity and volunteering

Time and money

The government’s proposals to boost charitable giving are myriad but modest

CRITICS called it the umpteenth relaunch of a failed idea. David Cameron insisted that he was fleshing out his vision of a more philanthropic, civically active Britain. Either way, the government's white paper on boosting charitable giving, launched on May 23rd alongside a speech by the prime minister on “the space between the market and the state”, confirmed that he is not giving up on his theme of the Big Society.

Many of his proposals look fiddly in isolation. The government, informed by research into behavioural science, hopes to “nudge” people into giving by making it possible to donate money through cash machines and introducing rewards for volunteering feats. There will be money—though, given the austere fiscal context, not much—for civic activity in poor areas, as well as for organisations that help to advertise and co-ordinate voluntary opportunities. The government, perhaps optimistically, hopes that lots of relatively small measures will add up to something big enough to rejuvenate Britain's third sector.

But critics wonder whether there is actually a problem to solve. Ministers say that the giving of time and money in Britain has “flatlined”, but the country still scores well by international standards. The World Giving Index, put together by the Charities Aid Foundation, an organisation that connects donors with charities, surveys 153 countries to find how many of their citizens had given money or time, or helped a stranger, in the past month. Britain is eighth, comfortably ahead of comparable countries such as France and Germany, and not far behind world leaders such as Australia and New Zealand.

Even during the recession, a clear majority of Britons were making charitable donations. In his efforts to sell the Big Society, Mr Cameron sometimes portrays his country as one enervated by decades of big government. The reality is that his policies are building on an already quite high-minded and generous society.

Donations themselves may not bring about a bigger society if they go to a handful of large and famous charities that have many of the characteristics of corporations and enjoy close relations with the state. The most popular charitable cause among British donors is medical research, an area necessarily dominated by sizeable, professional organisations. It is small, local charities that really make up civil society. This is why the government's desire to encourage the giving of time, and not just cash, is far-sighted. People can send their donations anywhere, but are much more likely to give their time to nearby projects.

The politics of the Big Society remain difficult. The phrase was invented principally to describe Mr Cameron's mission to increase people power in the public services through self-run state schools, elected police commissioners and the opening up of data on hospital performance and crime. But charity and volunteering, areas where vivid policies are far harder to come by, have come to be seen as the be-all and end-all of the Big Society. Many Tories want Mr Cameron to ditch the idea for good and stick to the bread-and-butter of the economy and the public services.

Behind the scenes, the Big Society has been beset by administrative chaos and a lack of follow-through. The day after Mr Cameron's speech, Lord Wei, a social activist and former management consultant who was put in charge of the policy, announced that he was leaving his role to return to community work.

So why does Mr Cameron stick with it? Partly because of the political calculation that he cannot be defined by spending cuts alone: he needs another, more optimistic narrative. But also because he believes in it. The telling aspect of Mr Cameron's upbringing was not its material privilege but its social wealth. He grew up in the Big Society; a village idyll of civic-minded neighbours, dutiful vicars and Rotary clubs. When he realised, fairly late in life, that some parts of Britain are desolate in comparison, he was moved to change that. The feasibility of his vision is questionable. The sincerity behind it is less so.